The Trip to Echo Spring (21 page)

What did he see that day? In 1959, Hemingway was sixty, married for the fourth and final time to Mary Welsh. In photographs he looks old and pained, bloated in the belly and frozen in the face, though I've also seen one of him kicking a can of beer on a snowy track in
Idaho, his whole weight poised on his left toe, his right leg scissored out at ninety degrees, balletic and limber as a boy. Sometimes, on a good day, he looks like a man in charge of himself, interested and glad to be alive. But then there are photographs in which he's drunk or drinking, or sat at a table surrounded by empty glasses. In these pictures he seems bewildered, somehow buried, a little smile, more often than not, stuck into his face.

Then there's the description given by Andrew Turnbull, Fitzgerald's biographer, who also met Hemingway that year. By coincidence they travelled back from Europe on the same boat. Hoping to discuss Fitzgerald, Turnbull sent over a letter of introduction. At first there was no reply, and so he strolled up to First Class, intrigued to see what Papa looked like. He spotted him a few times walking on his own, dressed in a plaid shirt and sleeveless leather jacket. Hemingway didn't speak to anyone, and looked ‘furtively away when another glance met his'. On the last day out he agreed to a drink with Turnbull, though he didn't want to be pumped about Fitzgerald. Writing the encounter up in the
New York Times,
Turnbull remembered being struck by his skinny forearms and ‘sad mask of a face', adding that Hemingway ‘seemed shy and wistful, with something inexpressible in his glance'.

In the winter of 1979, two decades after the morning in the Floridita and eighteen years after Hemingway's death in Ketchum, Idaho, Williams put Papa in a play.
Clothes for a Summer Hotel
is set in Highland Hospital, the asylum in Asheville, North Carolina, where Zelda Fitzgerald lived from 1936 until she was killed in a fire there in 1948. Madness, alcoholism, incarceration: those recurring, returning themes. A ghost play, he called it. It centres on the Fitzgeralds' marriage, and
takes place in a kind of afterlife, with everyone except Scott aware that they're dead and much preoccupied by the mode of their dying.

It wasn't a success. The critics loathed it, and it was the last of his plays to be staged on Broadway, a humiliation he never quite forgave. In a way, they were right. It's clumsy, badly constructed and absurdly didactic, showing in all its seams and creases the debilitating effect of alcohol on Williams's ability to think. And yet it's also touching, and so deeply felt that it's doubly painful to read.

In the scene with Hemingway, the two men circle one another at a party: Hemingway confident and insulting, Scott gentle and confused. Insinuations of homosexuality pass back and forth. It seems to be another version of Skipper and Brick in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,
the one willing to confess his feelings and the other boarded up and sick about it. A stage direction, italicised:

[He
approaches Scott. For a moment we see their true depth of pure feeling for each other. Hemingway is frightened of it, however.]

They talk and talk, quoting great chunks of their own history back and forth, as people generally don't but ghosts may do. In the closing minutes, Hemingway turns to his betrayal of Scott in
A Moveable Feast.
Scott listens; replies: ‘I suspect you were lonelier than I and possibly you were even as lonely as Zelda.' They stare at one another, and then Hemingway says:

Fuck it! Hadley, Hadley, call me, the game's gone soft, can't play it any longer.
[
Offstage, a woman's voice sings ‘Ma biond.']
– That's Miss Mary whom you never knew, a good, loving friend, and
a hunting, fishing companion – at the end. We sang that song together the night before I chose to blast my brains out for no reason but the good and sufficient reason that my work was finished, strong, hard work, all done – no reason to continue . . . What do you make of that, Scott?

The reference to the song is drawn from life. In Mary's memoir,
How It Was
, she recalls that on the last night in Ketchum, she and her ailing husband slept in separate rooms. They called between the walls to one another, using the familiar endearment
kitten
. Then Mary began to sing a song, and after a while her husband joined in. The song was called ‘Tutti mi chiamano Bionda' (‘They Call Me Blonde'), not ‘Ma biond', and it was about a woman's hair, a subject that had excited Hemingway his whole life.

Perhaps he was thinking then of Martha's taffy-coloured locks, or of Garbo peering past her fringe. Or perhaps he was thinking of Maria, Robert Jordan's lover in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
; the girl he calls
rabbit
;
little rabbit
. Her head was shaved by the Fascists, and has grown back in like corn. It's the colour of grain burned dark in the sun, and short as a beaver's pelt, so that when he runs his hand across her scalp it flattens beneath his fingers, causing his throat to thicken.

If he was thinking of Maria, perhaps he also thought of Robert Jordan, who once said to himself of the things he had done: ‘But my guess is you will get rid of all that by writing about it . . . Once you write it down it is all gone.' At the end of the novel he waits alone in the pine trees, his leg smashed beyond repair, trying to persuade himself to stay alive long enough to shoot a Fascist patrol leader, so that Maria and the little surviving band of partisans can make their getaway. He's
weakening, and he feels himself slipping, as you sometimes feel snow slipping on a mountain. He keeps thinking about shooting himself, before he faints and gets caught and tortured by the Fascists. ‘It would be all right to do it now,' he tells himself. ‘Really. I'm telling you it would be all right.' Then, having given himself permission, he finds he can wait a minute or two more, until the soldiers come riding up the trail and he has finished the strong, hard work he came for.

It wasn't so easy to find traces of Tennessee Williams's life in Key West, though he lived in the town for almost four decades. He arrived on 12 February 1941, during the peripatetic, poverty-stricken period before
Menagerie
changed the contours of his life forever. On that first visit, he stayed in the slave quarters of a sea captain's house called ‘Trade Winds' to convalesce after an operation to remove the cataract in his left eye. His play
Battle of Angels
had just failed in Boston, and he needed somewhere to recover his confidence as well as his vision. ‘I chose Key West,' he wrote in
Memoirs,
‘because swimming was practically a way of life for me, and since Key West was the southernmost point in America, I figured I would be able to swim there.'

So it proved. In addition to swimming, there were the alluring possibilities of cruising (the naval base meant swarms of sailors), as well as the quiet mornings, conducive to work. ‘Sponge and deep sea fishing are the main occupations and the houses are mostly clapboard shanties which have weathered grey with nets drying on the front porches and great flaming bushes of poinsettia in the yards,' he wrote to a friend from ‘Trade Winds', adding enthusiastically: ‘I shan't do
anything for the next few weeks but swim and lie on the beach till I begin to feel human again.'

He kept coming back. In 1949 he rented a cottage on Duncan Street, setting up house with his partner Frank Merlo and his grandfather, the skinny, stork-like Reverend Dakin, by now widowed and far from happy living in St. Louis with his daughter and increasingly aggressive son-in-law. The next spring, Tennessee bought the house and over the years extended it, adding a pool and a beautiful writing studio, with framed photographs of Chekhov and Hart Crane on the yellow walls. The palms and banana trees made wonderful sounds as he worked, he wrote happily to his friend Maria St. Just, ‘like ladies running barefooted in silk skirts downstairs'.

Saturday night dances at Sloppy Joe's, where a good band played on the stage and Frank would perform his wild version of the lindy hop. Swimming at South Beach, before the motels and car parks sprang up. The reassuring routines of work. For a long time, Key West represented an ideal kind of life, lulling and thrilling all at once. Take this statement, written early in the morning of the first day of 1954, when Tennessee was incarcerated in the hospital outside New Orleans with what he thought was cancer:

Oh how I long to be loose again, entering the Key West studio for morning work, with the sky and the Australian pines through the sky light and the clear morning light on all four sides and the warmth of coffee in me and the other world of creation. And driving out to the beach in the afternoon, the slow, easy, meditative drink on the pink terrace there, the long easy swim in the buoyant, pleasantly cool water.

How lovely it sounds. Listen to that stream of adjectives –
slow, easy, long
,
easy
,
buoyant
,
cool
: a place that nourishes, that facilitates the transition to whatever other world it is the writer co-inhabits. And again, a few years later, in a letter: ‘I am going . . . to rest and recuperate in a sweet, sweet place, the little house in Key West with Horse and dog.'

I went down to the little house one morning, when the sun was still low, and pale in the sky. It was on the corner of Duncan and Leon: a white clapboard cottage with freshly painted red shutters and a tin roof, almost hidden beneath giant palms and cactuses stuck at their tops with scraps of flowers like red silk. It looked like a more benign version of the jungle garden in
Suddenly Last Summer,
fecund and not wholly under human control.

Tennessee lived here on and off until his death in 1983, though not always in the company of his grandfather and Frank, whose surname, I remembered then, meant
blackbird.
It was their relationship that was preoccupying me that morning. By all accounts, Frank Merlo was a thoroughly decent man. ‘He was just plain good,' Christopher Isherwood observed: ‘a man who kept cool, even when he and Tennessee were exposed to the most appalling pressures of social and professional life.'

From the beginning there were tensions in the relationship – as, I expect, there are tensions in every relationship that's ever been. Frank wanted monogamy, but though he brought harmony and structure to Tennessee's life, exclusivity never seems to have been an option. Still, they kept house together in Florida and New York, spent summers bustling around in Europe, and though there were frequent bouts of cruising Frank remained the lynchpin of Tennessee's life. In 1949, he wrote with amazed pleasure: ‘I love F. – deeply, tenderly, unconditionally. I think I love with every bit of my heart.'

Things started to change in the latter half of the 1950s. After Cornelius Williams died in 1957 Tennessee went into psychoanalysis, and also spent a spell in what he described as a ‘plush-lined loony-bin' – drying out, or trying to. The seriousness with which he approached this endeavour can be gauged from his notebooks, in which he confesses day after day to ‘drinking a bit more than my quota'. One laconic itemisation includes: ‘Two Scotches at bar. 3 drinks in morning. A daiquiri at Dirty Dick's, 3 glasses of red wine at lunch and 3 of wine at dinner – Also two seconals so far, and a green tranquillizer whose name I do not know and a yellow one I think is called reserpine or something like that.'

The therapist, Dr. Kubie, was also attempting to cure him of homosexuality, ‘and has succeeded in destroying my interest in all except the Horse, and perhaps the Horse will go next'. There were other issues, too. In his notebooks and letters of the time, he referred often to a growing distance between him and Frank, though as late as August 1958 he was writing wistfully: ‘I miss the horse & dog that I live with in Rome.'

Squinting back at this confusing period from the 1970s, Tennessee thought that both men's drinking and drug use had been getting out of control, though the testimony of their friends suggests that the belief Frank was taking drugs was pure paranoia. He also liked to accuse his lover of sexual infidelity, though this too seems to have been at least partly projection: the maddening suspicion and unclarity of the chronic alcoholic. Weigh it up against his own self-confessed behaviour: foursomes with drag queens; running away for a weekend with a creamy-skinned boy he called the Dixie Doxy. Then home to tight silences, slammed doors, a plate of meatloaf hurled at the kitchen wall – the sort of behaviour Cheever found so baffling in his wife Mary, though
an onlooker might see a fairly obvious connection between a sloppy, unfaithful drunk and the desire to sleep alone at night.

Tracking events into the 1960s grows progressively more difficult. The letters become less frequent, while the notebooks, which Tennessee kept more or less faithfully from 6 March 1936, run out entirely in September 1958. We're left with
Memoirs:
that strange, untrustworthy document. The dates are often wrong, and incidents tend to be collapsed together or recounted out of sequence. As his one-time confidant Donald Windham observed, possibly resentfully: